title: Openness to Experience: its lower level structure, measurement, and cross-cultural equivalence.
abstract: Openness to Experience is an important but relatively poorly understood personality construct. Advances in openness research require further construct clarification as well as establishment of a common framework for conceptualizing and measuring the lower level structure of the construct. In this article, we present data from 3 studies to address this research need. In Study 1, we identify 6 facets of Openness to Experience--intellectual efficiency, ingenuity, curiosity, aesthetics, tolerance, and depth--based on a factor analysis of 36 existing Openness-related scales. In Study 2, we present further validity evidence for the 6-facet structure based on a newly developed measure of Openness. Data from this study also suggest the presence of 2 intermediate-level factors (i.e., aspects) of Openness: intellect and culture. In Study 3, we present a short form of the newly developed measure, retaining items that showed the highest internal consistency and measurement invariance across 3 samples: U.S. undergraduates, Chinese MBA students, and Chinese undergraduates. Together these 3 studies offer a more nuanced understanding of the multifaceted nature of the Openness construct.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Psychological Sciences , Purdue University.
authors.forename: Sang Eun
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Woo
authors.forename: Oleksandr S
authors.initials: OS
authors.lastname: Chernyshenko
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Longley
authors.forename: Zhi-Xue
authors.initials: ZX
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Chi-Yue
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Chiu
authors.forename: Stephen E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Stark
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002681:China; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003469:Culture; D005106:Exploratory Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010551:Personality; D010555:Personality Inventory; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States; D055815:Young Adult